The present invention relates to a new method and apparatus for flow control in a packet-switched microprocessor-based computer system (uniprocessor), a network of such computer systems, or a multiprocessor system. In particular, it relates to a new flow control design which provides efficient packet-switched control in a multiprocessor architecture, where slave requests from a processor to a slave on its local address bus are particularly efficiently processed.
The system of the invention in its preferred embodiment is based upon that described in applicant's U.S. Pat. No. 5,907,485, "Method and Apparatus for Flow Control in a Packet-Switched Computer System" by Ebrahim et al., filed Mar. 31, 1995, which is incorporated herein by reference.
The '485 patent presents solutions to many disadvantages found in prior systems by providing a new system for packet-switched flow control without negative feedback, handshakes, and other disadvantages as discussed therein. It presents an opportunity for further improvement and efficiency, however, in that in a multiprocessor environment, processor requests are forwarded to all the system controllers on the system, even those that are intended for a local slave, i.e. one on the sending processor's local address bus.
Thus, a need is presented for an improvement to the system of the '485 patent that increases the processing efficiency of processor requests sent to local slave devices.